Melbourne housing density grows sky high

Aisha Dow and Craig Butt

The number of homes in the City of Melbourne almost doubled in the decade to 2012, as new clusters of high-rise precincts emerged across the city.

A Fairfax analysis found 24 blocks were now considered to be “super dense”, compared with just three in 2002. These blocks cram 150 to 500 homes into areas about the size of a cricket ground.

The news comes amid growing concerns that the city’s intense residential precincts are being poorly planned, with residents going without basic community infrastructure.

The skyscraper suburb of Southbank is now home to more than 11,000 Melburnians, but the postcode does not have a school, bank or post office.

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“The big issue isn’t the development, it’s the lack of planning for the infrastructure that supports people living in the city,” Peter Renner, chairman of the committee of management at Southbank’s premium apartment building Freshwater Place, said.

“We’re living in a vertical town and we should enjoy the same facilities as any other town.”

About 28,000 new homes were added to the central city between 2002 and 2012, bringing the total number to almost 60,000. The greatest growth was in the CBD, Docklands and Southbank.

Much of the highly intense development has occurred in recent years, emerging from the rubble of former industrial areas. It includes a block in Southbank that now wears the crown as the city’s most concentrated residential area.

The area bounded by City Road and Power, Kavanagh and Balston streets was home to 1314 dwellings in 2012. In 2002 no one lived there.

It is possible there are other areas that would also fall into the super-dense category, as Melbourne City Council data does not include student dormitories.

Philip Goad, professor of architecture at Melbourne University, said while rapid development brought a number of positives into the central city, including an injection of life and people, Southbank had become a “city workers’ dormitory” because of a lack of basic public amenities such as parks and supermarkets.

Professor Goad called for developers to make a greater contribution to public infrastructure, housing and art projects.

Several new reforms have recently responded to concerns that developers do not care about the liveability of communities. Planning minister Matthew Guy recently announced a $4500-a-unit developer contribution for metropolitan strategic development areas. In a media interview he has also flagged a contribution of $15,000 for each dwelling in the urban renewal suburb of Fishermans Bend.

Meanwhile, Melbourne City Council is set to introduce developer contributions of between $900 and $3000 a unit for Southbank and City North to pay for streetscape upgrades and a community centre.

The council may also lobby the planning minister to introduce developer contributions in the Hoddle Grid amid forecasts the area is going to become the most popular city location for new apartments.

Councillor Stephen Mayne said Melbourne council received a record $6 million from developers last year through its open space levy. But that paled in comparison with the City of Sydney where, Cr Mayne said, more than $100 million was raked in annually through developer contributions.

In the meantime, he said, big business had been benefiting from an extraordinary increase in land prices, including the recent sale of the Savoy hotel at $44 million after being bought nine years earlier for $10 million.

The Victorian president of the Australian Institute of Architects, Peter Malatt, said he was concerned Melbourne was heading towards a two-class system – one with access to public infrastructure and services and another without.

“It’s a lower level of amenity that has become the norm and I don’t think that is good enough for Melbourne,” he said.